We are incredibly happy to be able to finally give the recording studio a little love & care.
We'd like to share with you some tips on isolation and reverberation treatment that might come in handy if you record music or dialogue.
Isolation
For phase 1, we gave our new recording room some acoustic isolation to get rid of the outside noise from traffic, planes and such.
First, we boarded up the window with a rockwool sandwich (plasterboard - rockwool - plasterboard) fortunately we still have a window in the control-room.
the wall with the window seen in the back got its first layer of rockwool ontop of the boarded up window.
after that, the walls and cieling got their first layer of insulation. We used the regular pink fiberglass insulation because it's less expensive and does the job pretty well.
Here are some shots of the process. with the exposed insulation, the room sounds very dead! unfortunately, it's not very pretty and also unsafe.
It's highly recommended that you use protective eyewear, long sleeves, gloves and mask when handling this material. I'm not entirely sure how dangeorous it is to your health, but it's sure as hell itchy and uncomfortable if it gets on your skin.
Reverberation
once the first layer of isolation was done, we moved on to make the room sound good. We achieved this by building some acoustic panels with Rockwool and pine frame. These help keep a lot of the sound waves from bouncing from wall to wall.
the Rockwool panels come in 4ft x 2ft size. So we just went ahead a kept them whole and built a frame around that. As you can see, the panel is kept in place by making a small lip on the frame. This will make it easy to hang from the ceiling.
For the fabric I went with black "coffee sack" fabric. I'm not a specialist in fabric, so I just went down to the shop and asked for something with loose threads, something you could see through if you hold it up to the light. The reasoning behind this is you want the sound waves to go through the fabric and into the mineral wool where they'll get absorbed.
Placing the panels about 1 foot (30 cm) apart has worked well in the past, so we went with that.
It keeps nasty reflections under control but the room still sounds natural.
Connections
I read about this awesome product by a company called Soundtools; it's called the Wall Cat. It's a two-gang wall plate that sends audio and phantom power over CAT5 cable.
It's very practical to send sound from one room to another and it's quite sleek looking as well.
we decided to use these because they're shielded, so you don't get any ground noise and running CAT5 cable is much easier and cost-effective. Just about anybody can install CAT5. Also because they keep the studio floor tidy (not so many cables)
here's a short video:
While we're on isolation I'd like to recommend that you think of your recording space as a tank of water. Try to make it water-tight. That means sealing every crack and even the tiniest hole.
one such problem area are electrical boxes. Consider buying some acoustic putty and covering the boxes that house light switches, electrical outlets, microphone and headphone jacks. It really makes a huge difference in reducing your sound leakage.
Look and feel
Finally, we added some rails and spotlights and a few plants for a warmer environment. I believe the artist in this picture was pleased :)
Here's a little jam session we did before recording; the song is titled Jamming Towards freedom.
enjoy!